Stickleback: London's Burning Part Nine References

Page One : The Mistral's Engine Room

Inspired by childhood visits to the two-storey River Don Engine at Kelham Island Industrial Museum in my native Sheffield.

Page Two: Maintenance Robots

Hands up; we're riffing on the spider-style machines from Scarlet Traces with some of this stuff.

Page Three: Sic Transit Gloria Swanson

Ian's instructions regarding the Countess's body language in this sequence was "I see her as going a bit Gloria Swanson, all silent movie arm movements and the like!" It made sense to make her body language big and bold, in the style of the more expressive silent film actors, since her masked face couldn't show expression.

Stickleback: England's Glory Part 8 & 9 References

Part 8

Page 5: The Other Dimension

It was our old friend H.P. Lovecraft who first came up with the notion of combining the ideas of alternate dimensions (from quantum physics) and underworlds/domains of evil (from folklore & mythology).

The appearance of our underworld owes a lot to the paradigms established by Swiss artist Hans Rudi (H.R.) Giger, whose "biomechanical" airbrush paintings led him to becoming a leading concept artist for Hollywood films, most notably with his seminal design for the creature in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).



Part 9

There are no new references in part 9.

Stickleback Part 9 References

I've been dreadfully lazy the last few days, but here are the references for Stickleback: Mother London part 9. Because the action takes place in established locations and no new characters are introduced, there are only a couple of new references:

Page Four: Gog And Magog

Gog and Magog's new incarnation as extensions of the giant tree, all wound around with roots and branches is an overt reference to the mythical figure of the Green Man - in fact, the idea is prefigured as early as the first panel of part one of the series, when the face of the Green Man appears on a milestone near the great oak.





Page Five: The Oak Connecting Earth, The Twins, The City And The People

This panel was my own clumsy homage to the work of Italian comic artist Sergio Toppi, whose beautiful, design-based, symbolic panel layouts are like the work of no other artist (though he had a considerable influence on the early work of Dave McKean).





Finally, the following panel (page 2 panel 2) doesn't contain any references, but I was really pleased with it, and wanted to show it off without the lettering:

Stickleback: Mother London is copyright © 2007 Rebellion/2dd
Created by Ian Edginton & Me.